The Required Minimum Distribution rules exist to prevent you from deferring tax on your IRA forever. The IRS gave you a tax break going in; eventually they want their money. Starting at age 73 (or 75 if you were born in 1960 or later, under SECURE Act 2.0), you’re required to withdraw a percentage of your pre-tax retirement balance every year — and pay ordinary income tax on every dollar of it.
The number itself is simple. Your prior-year-end balance divided by a life-expectancy factor from the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table. At 73 the factor is 26.5, so your first RMD is roughly 3.77% of last year’s balance. At 80 it climbs to 4.95%. At 90 it’s 8.20%. The percentage rises every year because the IRS’s life expectancy table tightens.
The reason RMDs matter so much for tax planning is that they’re not optional. You can’t delay them, you can’t reduce them by spending less, you can’t selectively pull from a Roth instead. Once you hit the start age, the IRS sets your taxable-income floor — and that floor often pushes retirees into a higher bracket, taxes a bigger chunk of Social Security, and triggers IRMAA Medicare-premium surcharges they hadn’t planned for.
What this calculator does
Enter your current age, your traditional IRA balance, and an assumed growth rate. The tool projects:
- Your RMD for every year through age 95
- The cumulative dollars you’ll be required to withdraw
- The tax bill at your assumed bracket
- The effect of QCD (Qualified Charitable Distribution) substitution if you give to charity from your IRA
That last point is the most underused planning lever in this whole space. If you donate to charity in retirement anyway, doing it through a QCD — directly from the IRA, before the dollars hit your taxable income — satisfies your RMD without raising your AGI. That keeps your Social Security taxable percentage down, your IRMAA tier down, and your effective marginal rate down. For a retiree giving $20K/year to charity, the IRMAA savings alone can be $2,000+ per couple per year.
Three planning moves before RMDs start
The years between retirement and your first RMD — call it ages 60 to 73 — are the most flexible tax years of your life. Most retirees don’t appreciate how short that window is until it’s closing.
- Roth-convert during low-income gap years. If you retired at 62 but Social Security and RMDs haven’t started yet, your taxable income is artificially low. Filling the 12% or 22% bracket with Roth conversions now reduces the Traditional IRA balance that’ll feed RMDs later. We do this with clients every year and it’s the highest-leverage tax-planning move in retirement.
- Front-load Roth contributions during working years. If you’re still earning, prioritizing Roth 401(k) and Roth IRA over Traditional reduces the future RMD base. Even partial Roth shifting compounds.
- Map the QCD strategy in advance. If you plan to give to charity in retirement, set up the receiving organization to accept QCDs and budget the giving as part of the RMD. This is paperwork once, savings every year.
What this calculator can’t model
A word of honesty: the real RMD complication isn’t the math — it’s the interaction with everything else. RMDs feed taxable income, which feeds Social Security taxation, which feeds IRMAA brackets, which feed your healthcare costs. A multi-year tax-aware plan models all four at once. This calculator models the first.
For households with $500K+ of investable assets, RMD planning is a multi-year, multi-account exercise that typically saves $30,000–$200,000 in lifetime taxes when done well. The work is in the coordination, not the arithmetic. T&T Capital Management has been doing fee-only fiduciary tax-coordinated planning since 2011.
Run yours.